Big Reds

A week or so ago, Pete was signing up walk-ons for a trip today, starting in Solomons, marking his move back from the more northern South River marina. Our first stop was Cedar Point light, where we rather quickly caught our limits of stripers, and headed north searching for possible Bluefish, Spanish Mackerel and who knows what else.

We found some breaking fish, a mixture of small stripers with a few blues, and underneath, magic. A giant bull Redfish, 48 inches, and around 45 lbs as estimated by the Boga Grip scale. Another fisherman hooked one at the same time, but Pete had to choose which one to follow, and the second broke off.

We stayed in the area for quite a while, hoping for more magic, but alas, no more. So we moved a few miles (the whole time we were within sight of Flag Harbor).  Huge moving breaking patches of mostly tiny stripers, yielded a few small blues, 2 Spanish Mackerel, and  . . .

More bull reds!  All the reds came on 1.5-2 ounce metal jigs fished on the bottom in 20-25 ft of water under schools of much smaller fish.

 And then it was my turn:

The fish was over the end of the  48 inch ruler, and bottomed out the 50 lb scale on the boga grip.

A little while later, I hooked a second, and once I fought it up to the boat, we saw it was tail hooked, and deciding that it wasn't going to do either us or the fish much good to try to get it into the boat, so I held the spool, and broke it off.

On the way back, we ran into a pretty good sized school of dolphins.






Update: A video from another trip that I wasn't on: